Friday, July 12, 2013

This debate ( audio | 1:20m ) took place last week between Chris Hallq and Calum Miller. It was supposed to be on probability and the resurrection, though they didn't really go into the details that the title of the episode implies, sadly.

2.25 Stars: Nothing too insightful seeps out of this debate with a blogging favorite and young English apologist.

I won't lie, I was pretty disappointed with the show. From reading the APF reviews of the past shows of Unbelievable and a few of my own experiences with other eps, it seems like the show has misses that significantly outweigh the hits. This is a bummer considering the show does get great guests and has such interesting topics!

But on to the debate. Or lack of it. I had some hope this would become a more technical debate in that it would talk more about probability. Bayes Theorem was only brought up once and it actually wasn't even defined or explained, at least not directly.

Calum also seemed like the most liberal Christian and though he didn't do terrible or anything, he just wasn't amazing, either. One weird thing is that Calum doesn't like the KCA, the argument WL Craig is famous for popularizing.

As for Hallquist, a great blogger I enjoy following, he suffers from an issue that apparently has plagued him before: his speech is filled with ums and uhs. People have told him about this and I feel bad stacking more criticism on him but it just became too distracting. Also, I think it was contagious, the host even started um-ing and uh-ing more it seemed.

Hallq did make some good points about Mormonism but they didn't so relevant to the topic when they were mentioned, or at least I bet that's how Christians will see it considering how critical they are of Mormonism (unless of course the Republican nom is Mormon, then they seem to be more open towards the religion :P). I was also a little annoyed that even though he was asked to debate probability with a student of Richard Swinburne - the guy who came up with the stat that there is a 97% chance that the resurrection was true - he said he had only read Swinburne's book a while ago.

I was surprised to find out that Hallq and I are the same age and Calum
sounded pretty young too. One of the perks of Unbelievable is that it
seems more willing to get younger guests on and this has some pros and
cons. A pro is that people like Hallq and Ed Turner get to go up against
apologists who should pretty much be considered professionals in their
field...though in this case Calum doesn't seem to be one nor is he
claiming to be one.